On a related note: if you speak German, make sure to subscribe to OLIVI_DE - Oracle LInux und VIrtualisierung - a German blog covering topics around Oracle Linux,
Virtualization (primarily with Oracle VM) as well as Cloud Computing using Oracle Technologies. It is maintained by Manuel Hoßfeld and Sebastian Solbach (Sales Consultants at Oracle Germany) and will also include guest posts by other authors (including yours truly).

Thursday Apr 05, 2012

A new set of RPM packages of our port of DTrace for Linux has just been published on the Unbreakable Linux Network. This is another beta release of our ongoing development effort to bring the DTrace framework to Linux.

This release includes the following changes:

The packages are now based on the final public release of the Unbreakable Enterprise Kernel Release 2 (2.6.39). The previous beta drop was based on a development version of the 2.6.39 kernel; there is no new functionality specific to DTrace in this release. The primary goal was to get the code base in sync with the released kernel version.

Based on the feedback we received from some users in how their applications interact with dtrace, libdtrace is now a shared library. However, the API/ABI is not fully stabilized yet and may be subject to change.

As a result of the ongoing QA testing, some test cases were reorganized into their own subdirectories, which allows running the test suite in a more fine-grained manner.

This week, the Linux DTrace team also attendeded the second dtrace.conf in San Francisco, to talk about their work. The sessions were streamed live and recordings are also available. You can watch Oracle's Kris Van Hees' talk below:

Oracle is actively involved in several of the projects under discussion there and they participated in
discussions involving the most pressing challenges facing Linux-based storage
today. Topics ranged from getting Linux developers more involved in the hard
drive industry to handling low-end flash cards to moving implementations of
distributed and cluster file systems forward on Linux.

For a more detailed report on the summit, see the excellent coverage on LWN: